7.

THE COMPEt.i.tION WE FOSTERED, ALONE AND TOGETHER, became a pleasure rather than a hindrance: We brought our rivalry into the light and tried to tame it. Every time I swam, I chose a lane near an unwitting opponent, preferably a man, who was faster than I; then I flung myself through my laps for the next half hour, trying to catch him. Each October after the world-cla.s.s Head of the Charles regatta, Caroline would go out on the water alone and row the three-plus-mile course, timing herself to see where she fell in her age and weight group. The race itself was too nerve-racking for her, and she didn't care about competing publicly. Like me, she set an anonymous golden mean and raced against it. became a pleasure rather than a hindrance: We brought our rivalry into the light and tried to tame it. Every time I swam, I chose a lane near an unwitting opponent, preferably a man, who was faster than I; then I flung myself through my laps for the next half hour, trying to catch him. Each October after the world-cla.s.s Head of the Charles regatta, Caroline would go out on the water alone and row the three-plus-mile course, timing herself to see where she fell in her age and weight group. The race itself was too nerve-racking for her, and she didn't care about competing publicly. Like me, she set an anonymous golden mean and raced against it.

Caroline always said that she and her sister had navigated their shared terrain by divvying up the goods. "Becca got math and science, I got English and history," she liked to say, and we did something similar with our curriculum in the writing life: Our sublimation within the safer realm of athletics allowed us to bolster each other professionally. According to our unspoken rule, Caroline was the columnist and I was the critic; she wrote about the personal and psychological, while I claimed the province of a.n.a.lysis and interpretation. It helped that I was older, and that we both loved our work and had been rewarded in kind. I think we were each good enough at what we did that we could applaud, mostly unequivocally, the other's victories.

When one of us was the clear superior, it softened the odds-it took the pressure off the other's Inner Marine. You will always always be the better rower, I told her one summer, with relief; that meant I could actually relax and let her train me. And rowing was the shared Eden that allowed us unbridled effort and victory, whatever the race. Caroline's willowy prowess on the water testified to years of work, and she took unabashed pride in this accomplishment: One of life's grace notes had been the morning when Harry Parker, legendary oarsman and Harvard crew coach, spotted Caroline on the river and gave her a thumbs-up in front of his amateur eights, then had her demonstrate her stroke. In winter, desolate at the long season when the river was frozen, Caroline retired to the gym, where she had been known to do stomach crunches with a ten-pound weight on her chest. Weaker but only slightly less fanatical, I nearly killed myself trying to do the plough (a contortionist's back stretch) on my kitchen floor, simply because Caroline had shown it to me that afternoon on the asphalt path at Fresh Pond. In the offseason, I joined Gold's Gym, listening to the male weight lifters make primate noises while I suffered through a half hour on the indoor rowing machines. Walking the icy trails of January, we fantasized about winter-sport possibilities: Was it too late in life to take up the luge? By the time New England's erratic spring arrived, we were pawing the ground like crazed horses. We knew that thrashing around on the water during a cold and windy March could be frustrating and even foolish. be the better rower, I told her one summer, with relief; that meant I could actually relax and let her train me. And rowing was the shared Eden that allowed us unbridled effort and victory, whatever the race. Caroline's willowy prowess on the water testified to years of work, and she took unabashed pride in this accomplishment: One of life's grace notes had been the morning when Harry Parker, legendary oarsman and Harvard crew coach, spotted Caroline on the river and gave her a thumbs-up in front of his amateur eights, then had her demonstrate her stroke. In winter, desolate at the long season when the river was frozen, Caroline retired to the gym, where she had been known to do stomach crunches with a ten-pound weight on her chest. Weaker but only slightly less fanatical, I nearly killed myself trying to do the plough (a contortionist's back stretch) on my kitchen floor, simply because Caroline had shown it to me that afternoon on the asphalt path at Fresh Pond. In the offseason, I joined Gold's Gym, listening to the male weight lifters make primate noises while I suffered through a half hour on the indoor rowing machines. Walking the icy trails of January, we fantasized about winter-sport possibilities: Was it too late in life to take up the luge? By the time New England's erratic spring arrived, we were pawing the ground like crazed horses. We knew that thrashing around on the water during a cold and windy March could be frustrating and even foolish.

But within a year after that first summer at Chocorua, where Caroline had shown me the fire, I also knew there was no such thing as a bad row. It opened up the world in such powerful and quotidian ways that the promise of it, whether in February or August, gave us a calendar by which to mark our pa.s.sion. From my first full season on the water, Caroline indulged my fervor with fond recognition of what she had been through years before. If the water was perfect-gla.s.sy and still-we would drop anything (dentist appointments, dinner obligations) to get on the river. I often went out in early evening, when the wildlife had settled and the sh.o.r.eline had gone from harsh brightness to Monet's gloaming, and then I would row back to the dock in golden light, the other scullers moving like fireflies across the water.

My stubbornness and upper-body strength compensated for my weak leg, and within a couple of seasons I had managed a pa.s.sable stroke. I got stronger, faster, exhilarated on a daily basis. I went out in wind gusts and rain and came back spent and calm. Caroline had warned me that my entire relationship to the river would change, and to be careful driving-with the Charles River winding alongside Memorial Drive, it was easy to forget about oncoming traffic if you were rubbernecking the condition of the water. "The river will become a character in your life," Caroline told me. "You'll be amazed how much influence it will have on your day."

By autumn, I had mapped out an entire country of flora and fauna, much of it invisible from land. I began to set my internal clock of miles logged by the landmarks I encountered. There was the man who played bagpipes each morning on a bend in the river-"The Halls of Montezuma" and, if I was lucky, "Amazing Grace"-and the muskrat a quarter mile upstream, appearing with such reliability that I could believe it was for my benefit. (There was also, less decorous, the exhibitionist on the wooded end of the river who flashed women rowers, about whom Caroline had warned me.) Most of all there was the arc and geography of the river and my place upon it. By September the goslings of spring would be learning to dive on their own; the marshes had turned from green to golden rose. All of it offered a palette in time and s.p.a.ce where beauty was anch.o.r.ed to change.

I usually saw Caroline on her way upriver: the blond ponytail, the back of a dancer, a stroke as fluid as it was exact. (She never saw me until I called out to her, and even then she had to squint. The gla.s.ses she needed and refused to wear never left the glove box of her car.) Some days we would meet on a wide stretch by the finish line of the Head of the Charles. The moment she squared her blades and stopped, Caroline checked her watch, sometimes surrept.i.tiously; even on the gentlest of rows, she was gauging her time. Then she would watch my stroke and give me a drill to occupy me for a few days. "Use your abs for the recovery," she would say. "Stop checking behind you; you're clear. Use your thumbs before you feather!" I thrilled to the language as well as the instruction.

In the summer of 2000, when I was forty-nine and Caroline was about to turn forty-one, we decided that we had one last chance to realize a dream: to row in a double in our age division in the Head of the Charles. We were mistaken about the age stipulation, which accepts any pairing with an age average over forty, but the fantasy stuck, and it gave us a mission for the season. It was the sort of goal we both loved, one that we could discuss endlessly while incorporating its training demands into our daily routines. Because we both fell into the under-130-pound weight division, we decided that we would bill ourselves as the Literary Lightweights-good for a few laughs on the river, we thought, and maybe even a corporate sponsor or two. Morelli, who had long wanted Caroline to show her stuff in a race, had T-shirts made for us with a tiny oarsman on the breast; he promised to hang off the bridges and photograph us during training sessions. As the more accomplished rower, Caroline would steer while I rowed stroke, which meant that she would have to slow her pace to mine.

This handicap was of no consequence to her and mattered greatly to me. I added stomach crunches and leg lifts to my regimen, and started taking my pulse after sprints on the water. I plied Caroline with progress reports: stroke rate, heart rate, technical or psychic breakthroughs. She endured my single-mindedness and placated me when she could. "I'm afraid I'll fail you," I said one day, with great seriousness; my German shepherd spirit at the ready, I had already turned a lark into a challenge of enormous weight.

"I will only only do this with you if it can be fun," she told me, and my antennae went up. "Fun" was a nebulous concept for both of us; her therapist was always trying to impose it on her. Fun was far more difficult to get a handle on than zeal. But I listened to her that day and tried to bank my fires, and eventually my training rituals became an end unto themselves. do this with you if it can be fun," she told me, and my antennae went up. "Fun" was a nebulous concept for both of us; her therapist was always trying to impose it on her. Fun was far more difficult to get a handle on than zeal. But I listened to her that day and tried to bank my fires, and eventually my training rituals became an end unto themselves.

We missed the entrance for our division that year, which for first-timers is decided by lottery. I think we were both relieved, for two reasons. One was that we had started training late in the season and weren't ready to race. The other, more revealing reason was that Caroline and I were each so goal-oriented-she once told me that "mastery" was her favorite feeling-that we wanted the next season, and the next, to have an occasion to set our hopes and focus toward. Like most odysseys, ours on the Charles was more about the journey than the finish line. The metaphor of rowing may have been what we loved the most: the antic.i.p.ation, the muscles spent and miles logged, the September harvest moon. Because we both possessed that single trait that makes a lifelong rower-endurance-we declared that we would row the Head together in our seventies, when the field had thinned sufficiently to give us a fighting chance. The fantasy would fuel us for two more winters.

After the 2000 regatta had come and gone, in late October, we took out the double to see how we might have measured up. It was a fiasco from the start: The boat had been rigged for giants, which meant that we were half prostrate during a full stroke; we didn't realize this mechanical mishap until we were too far out on the water to make adjustments. The wind picked up, accompanied by haphazard gusts that made the river a sea of chop. Then the rain started-a cold autumn rain that pelted us from behind and threatened our nerves as well as our grip on the oars. Caroline responded to these horrid conditions by rowing harder. My stroke grew ragged and then uneven, until she finally told me to stop rowing altogether; if my rhythm was too far off, she would be battling against me. Frustrated by my own performance, I was in awe of hers: The worse the rain and the stronger the current, the steadier she became. We rowed the entire course, cheering as we crossed a deserted finish line. We were soaked from rain and waves, elated from laughter and exertion. I lay back in the boat and let Brut.i.ta row us home.

8.

THAT DECEMBER, A BLIZZARD STRANDED ME FOR days in Texas, where I had gone to see my family for the holidays. I finally managed to get on a flight that was rerouted through Chicago to Ma.s.sachusetts. Caroline, in touch by phone during the ordeal, had taken Clementine to my apartment an hour before my flight was scheduled to arrive in Boston. At the end of a marathon travel day, I sank into the back of a cab at Logan Airport, wanting nothing more than to be in my own home, wanting my couch and the feel of Clementine's ruff and the sound of Caroline's voice on the phone. "Hostage to attachment," I remember thinking, the words coming out of nowhere. Leaving town was what told me, reminded me, how much I relied on these two creatures to give purchase to the emotional ground of my life. If by now this realization was more consoling than unnerving, it was still a radical departure from my norm. However skittish Caroline could be, I may have been worse-more stubborn, more reflexively prideful-when the real bruisers of life showed up. In crisis, I circled my wagons, more afraid of being disappointed by someone than of going it alone. days in Texas, where I had gone to see my family for the holidays. I finally managed to get on a flight that was rerouted through Chicago to Ma.s.sachusetts. Caroline, in touch by phone during the ordeal, had taken Clementine to my apartment an hour before my flight was scheduled to arrive in Boston. At the end of a marathon travel day, I sank into the back of a cab at Logan Airport, wanting nothing more than to be in my own home, wanting my couch and the feel of Clementine's ruff and the sound of Caroline's voice on the phone. "Hostage to attachment," I remember thinking, the words coming out of nowhere. Leaving town was what told me, reminded me, how much I relied on these two creatures to give purchase to the emotional ground of my life. If by now this realization was more consoling than unnerving, it was still a radical departure from my norm. However skittish Caroline could be, I may have been worse-more stubborn, more reflexively prideful-when the real bruisers of life showed up. In crisis, I circled my wagons, more afraid of being disappointed by someone than of going it alone.

For reasons that probably have to do with temperament and heritage both, I had spent a lifetime cultivating a little too much independence. Absurd or commendable, a lot of this behavior was unnecessarily severe. I'd hitchhiked long distances alone in my twenties; for years I'd swum the Wellfleet ponds after Labor Day, when they were deserted, until an early autumn thunderstorm convinced me this was a bad idea. Such feats, I privately held, were heroic in correlation to the amount of suffering invoked. Even after I stopped drinking, I never wanted my solitude to limit my range, so I signed up for work a.s.signments that took me to Wyoming or London or anywhere I hadn't been-gritting my teeth at the difficulty of such pursuits, plowing ahead because I thought I should be willing to bear the pain and isolation in order to glean the adventure.

But as much as I complained about my solitude, I also required it. I put a high price on my freedom from obligation, of having to report to no one. My sister, contentedly married a thousand miles away, laughed whenever I expressed the fantasy of holding out to find the right man to marry. "I don't know, Caldwell," she would say, resorting to our old adolescent habit of using surnames for each other. "I don't think you could do it. You'd need a pretty long leash."

The truth was that I had always fled. The men I didn't marry; the relationships I had walked away from or only halfheartedly engaged in-there were always well-lit exits, according to building code, in every edifice I helped create. "Let's face it," a male friend, single and in his forties, said to me one day about our unpartnered status. "Neither one of us got here without a lot of fancy footwork." I laughed at the time, but I was unsettled by how astute the comment was, and more obvious to him than to me.

AFTER THE CAB HAD dropped me at my apartment that winter night, I hugged the dog and called Caroline's answering machine, to let her know I had made it. It was after eight p.m. and I didn't really expect to talk with her. "I'm home, I'm all right," I said. "Don't bother picking up. I'm heading to the store-I'll talk to you tomorrow." dropped me at my apartment that winter night, I hugged the dog and called Caroline's answering machine, to let her know I had made it. It was after eight p.m. and I didn't really expect to talk with her. "I'm home, I'm all right," I said. "Don't bother picking up. I'm heading to the store-I'll talk to you tomorrow."

Twenty minutes later, I was loading groceries into my old Volvo when an out-of-control driver came veering through the parking lot at high speed and plowed into the back of my car. It happened so fast that I later remembered only a blur of white movement, then flying through the air. The Volvo had taken a bullet for me: The impact of one car into another had sent me flying like a billiard ball. When I came to, I was on my hands and knees on the pavement, yards away from point of impact; I had blood spewing from my chin and I was cursing. A group of people were standing around me. Somebody called 911; another disembodied voice claimed to recognize me, and gathered what was left of the spilled groceries to take to my house. When the EMTs arrived and strapped me to a backboard, I started arguing with them about cutting off my jeans and Lucchese boots. By the time I got to the hospital, I was giddy with adrenaline and telling jokes: that false pride of the trenches.

I was on the backboard for an hour waiting for an X-ray; by the time they released me, it was eleven p.m. My injuries were not serious-st.i.tches in my chin, sprains and contusions but no broken bones-but I hollered in pain when I tried to put weight on my leg. Overwhelmed by more dire emergencies, the hospital staff gave me a cane and called me a cab. In the three hours I had been there, never once did it occur to me, with a phone four feet away from where I lay, to call Caroline or anyone else for help.

Or I should say that when it did occur to me, I dismissed it with the defensive sangfroid of crisis. It was Sunday night; I knew Morelli would be at Caroline's, spending the night. I didn't want to wake them, and I knew if I called they would feel duty-bound to come to the hospital. Pleased by my self-reliance, I half stumbled, half crawled up the stairs to my apartment.

But when I got inside, when I was in my living room at midnight, with Clementine nosing my bloodstained jeans, I broke down. I had phoned my parents back in Texas, who were expecting word that my plane had arrived safely, and lied through my teeth. They were in their eighties, my dad was in the first stage of Alzheimer's, and I saw no need to alarm them. Then all my derring-do collapsed and I dialed Caroline's number. My voice broke when she answered. "I'm all right, I'm all right," I kept saying, an insistent preface to the story so I wouldn't scare her. We stayed on the phone until she had convinced me to find something to eat and get into bed.

My car, a ten-year-old Volvo, had been totaled. The next day, Caroline came to get me and we drove back to the store parking lot; she went inside the market to grab some essentials for me while I tried to start the car and get the registration. Ten minutes later, she came out to find me standing, glazed-eyed, near the place where I'd landed; there was a pool of dried blood on the asphalt. On the drive home she was unnervingly quiet, and finally she blurted out the reason. "I keep thinking that if I had just picked up the phone when you first called," she said, "this never would have happened. Three minutes later, and you'd have been out of the path of that car."

I knew this inner dialogue of self-blame; it was treacherous and unwinnable. Caroline was worried not just that she'd failed to intervene with the stupid calamities of fate, but that she was somehow responsible-that her isolationist tendencies had put me in harm's way. This was the sort of mind-set we could both engage in, and so I postulated the opposite: If she had had picked up, I insisted, I might well have been just walking out of the store, and in the car's direct line of fire. picked up, I insisted, I might well have been just walking out of the store, and in the car's direct line of fire.

For all the gritty education this incident provided, its one indelible moment, there long after the bruises were healed and the car replaced, was the one I had told Caroline about that afternoon: the thought that went through my mind when I was midair. The world appears with ferocious technicolor during crisis, and a decade later, I remember the visual arc of my body being airborne, my sight line about two feet higher than normal. But what I remember most was the territorial a.s.sault I felt, the indignation, while I was sailing through s.p.a.ce. How dare you How dare you, the body and mind felt in furious accord. I'm in the middle of a life here I'm in the middle of a life here. I was outraged because I had been working on this story line for years, and I knew it was not yet finished.

AFTER I HAD LIVED IN THE EAST FOR A DECADE, long enough to winnow the realities from the dreams, I was driving down Brattle Street one winter night at the start of a storm, when the snow was surfing the currents of a soft wind, and I had the dissonant thought that I could grow old here-something I had never thought about anywhere before, and certainly not during a New England winter. But Cambridge had reached out to me from the beginning. I loved the ornery brick-lined sidewalks and self-contained serenity that the town projected: all that formidable history b.u.mping into pear blossoms and street musicians.

I had danced around the idea of owning property for years, usually as an alternate reality to wherever I was. I fantasized about a little piece of land in Truro, on the then desolate end of Cape Cod. I thought about a small house in Austin where I could spend winters, or a farmhouse outside the city with room for a couple of dogs. As the search had grown more realistic, I began looking at houses all over Greater Boston, exhausting myself with possibilities or mooning over properties I couldn't afford. I was like a wolf circling its parameters, looking everywhere but the epicenter of my life.

The false starts probably mirrored my tendency toward flight and longing. Leave Texas, then miss it forever. Love your family from two thousand miles away. Refuse to marry, then spend your life complaining that you should have. The ingrained trait that my mother had called brooding had a free run when it came to where I imagined I belonged. I could explore alternate universes to my heart's content within the world of geographical could-have-beens, where the endings were always kinder and the real estate cheaper. "I should have stayed in the Panhandle, and I'd be happily married to some rancher and have five or six kids," I once announced to my therapist, who typically did not laugh out loud at such p.r.o.nouncements. "I think the operative word here is 'happily,'" he said, always ready to scorch an illusion when he could. As a follow-up joke he sent me a map of the actual town of Happy, Texas, a little place of about seven hundred people south of Amarillo. I kept the map of Happy on my study wall for years, to remind me of the Elysian Fields we all envision.

"SCRATCH A FANTASY and you'll find a nightmare." This was one of Caroline's favorite sayings, spoken originally in regard to a mutual friend, a woman who had chased a dream life abroad and wound up trapped and unhappy. Then the saying became code for all those seemingly perfect lives being lived someplace else, with better jobs or partners or inner states. Whenever I would say (in winter or traffic, or on a bad day), "Why do we live here?" Caroline would respond, instantly, "Fresh Pond and Starbucks." Starbucks wasn't yet on every corner in America, but Caroline was shorthanding for the ineffable whole: the surly poet on the corner, or the river at dusk, or the store with the butcher who knew us by name. We lived here for each other, and for everyone else we loved within twenty miles, and for all the good reasons people live where they live. They need the view of a wheat field or an ocean; they need the smell of a thunderstorm or the sound of a city. Or they need to leave, so that they can invent what they need someplace else. and you'll find a nightmare." This was one of Caroline's favorite sayings, spoken originally in regard to a mutual friend, a woman who had chased a dream life abroad and wound up trapped and unhappy. Then the saying became code for all those seemingly perfect lives being lived someplace else, with better jobs or partners or inner states. Whenever I would say (in winter or traffic, or on a bad day), "Why do we live here?" Caroline would respond, instantly, "Fresh Pond and Starbucks." Starbucks wasn't yet on every corner in America, but Caroline was shorthanding for the ineffable whole: the surly poet on the corner, or the river at dusk, or the store with the butcher who knew us by name. We lived here for each other, and for everyone else we loved within twenty miles, and for all the good reasons people live where they live. They need the view of a wheat field or an ocean; they need the smell of a thunderstorm or the sound of a city. Or they need to leave, so that they can invent what they need someplace else.

According to our mutually mythic pasts, I was the exile and Caroline the child who had stayed. I'd fled the bleak farm and ranchlands of the Panhandle, made it to Austin five hundred miles south, and lived in San Francisco for a couple of years before finally heading for the East. Caroline had grown up in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Radcliffe quad; when she left for college, she went to Brown University in Providence, an hour away. She came back to Cambridge four years later and had strayed only so far as a couple of neighborhoods from her childhood home. Her familiar was my exotic-her Cambridge was my Amarillo-and it seemed part of the price of urbanity, like growing up in Greenwich Village, that it was too cool a hometown to flee. The year after her parents' deaths, Caroline had bought an attached Victorian house in the middle of Cambridge, with wide pine floors and an exposed brick chimney and ten-foot ceilings. More than a century old, the place was all angles and elegance, with comfortable mission furniture and Lucille's toys within carefully organized reach. I lived a few miles away, in a light-filled second-floor apartment I had rented for a decade. Much of the ambivalence I felt about setting down roots was softened by the sense of shelter I knew Caroline's house provided her. When pragmatism finally won out over inertia, I began the Sunday open house slog through scores of property listings-the standard heart-of-darkness journey that accompanies house hunting. And Caroline, intrepid soldier, went along for the entire march.

Financial limitations aside, a property search for a single woman can be a nerve-racking expedition, complete with blueprints of the status quo. I found that residential real estate, particularly in New England, was an ill.u.s.tration of demographics: Single-family houses were just that, colonials and Victorians built with nuclear families in mind. Every time I visited one, my stomach sank and I felt an overwhelming fatigue. Formal dining rooms, upstairs bedrooms? I wanted to weep from estrangement. The architecture-for-singles had its own problems, diminutive s.p.a.ces and features that seemed a subtle punishment for going it alone. There were oppressively small houses with low ceilings and cramped rooms. Or apartments in old three-deckers or large apartment buildings, which meant you gave up a yard and privacy and parking for an affordable mortgage.

Caroline and I dissected every angle of this mora.s.s. I would drive home from Sunday open houses, spent and empty-headed, and call her for a reality check, or she would meet me at the appointed place and march through the rooms, cheerful and skeptical at once. Did I really want to live in this gorgeous third-floor aviary, she would ask, with my b.u.m leg and a sixty-pound dog? It was the season of bidding wars and land rushes, and places were selling in a day or an hour-one manic agent had called me at nine-thirty at night, wanting me to bid on a place I hadn't even seen. I'd been in this queue of desperation (and lost) a couple of times, only to be outbid by those with more money or less sangfroid than I. The high stakes of real estate hunting fed my anxiety; the market in those days was like a game of musical chairs, with everyone frantically trying to get situated before the music died.

In early spring of 2001, I made an offer on a little house in the suburbs with a large, overgrown yard; Caroline had climbed up the back fence the day before the open house to get a look at it. Then I panicked at the last minute. I saw my future unfolding before me with years of manicured streets and quiet New England reserve, and the picture horrified me. As nebulous as they may have seemed from the outside, my criteria had been honed by years of considering what I didn't didn't want-and by the outlines of what my spirit craved. What I wanted was a dorm for grown-ups, someplace with flowers and dogs and people who looked like I felt. A colleague had articulated this netherland of intuition for me. She was a young, hip African American lesbian with a couple of body piercings, and we had talked endlessly about the perils of real estate for single women and about where we each belonged. "Let me put it this way," she said. "On the day I move in, I don't want to be the most interesting thing happening in the neighborhood." Her wry ac.u.men came back to me the day I signed an offer on the house in the suburbs. The well-appointed agent shook my hand and said, "You seem so want-and by the outlines of what my spirit craved. What I wanted was a dorm for grown-ups, someplace with flowers and dogs and people who looked like I felt. A colleague had articulated this netherland of intuition for me. She was a young, hip African American lesbian with a couple of body piercings, and we had talked endlessly about the perils of real estate for single women and about where we each belonged. "Let me put it this way," she said. "On the day I move in, I don't want to be the most interesting thing happening in the neighborhood." Her wry ac.u.men came back to me the day I signed an offer on the house in the suburbs. The well-appointed agent shook my hand and said, "You seem so interesting interesting!" Two days later, I took my interesting self out of the deal.

And then, on a blossom-drenched day in May when I had nearly given up, I saw a listing for half of a rambling 1920s clapboard house on a magnolia-lined street in Cambridge. The apartment was smaller than what I wanted; the owner had painted the walls mustard yellow and hung red velvet drapes in the dining room. I cared about none of this. What had seized my heart before I ever went inside were the towering maples overlooking the long driveway, leading to an enclosed garden of dogwood and lilacs and a sixty-foot sycamore maple in the middle of the city. I had lived in New England for two decades, but I was still a Texan, and I knew the land mattered more than what was on it. I went after the trees.

Caroline loved this house. She saw past its imperfections-the lack of a guest room, the upstairs neighbor-to her certainty that it was my home. The place was halfway between the river where I rowed and the woods where we walked; the neighborhood had a park and an Italian take-out joint and a dozen people I knew. The open house lasted one hour, and at the end of the evening there were four offers on the place. A couple outbid me, outlandishly, by tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price; presumably, they had loved the trees as well. Within forty-eight hours, they withdrew their offer, and the agent called to say the place was mine if I wanted it. I told him I needed an hour to think, hung up, and called Caroline. "Yes," she said, unequivocally. "Yes." "Yes."

Several weeks later, after the usual steep education in property buying, I was standing on the front porch of what was now my house, fiddling with the keys, dumb with fatigue and vague apprehension. Inside lay a near gut job of months of renovation. I heard someone drive up behind me and turned to see Caroline and Morelli at the curb in Caroline's Toyota RAV, both of them grinning and waving at me to wait up. I got the door unlocked just as Caroline vaulted up the front steps. And while Morelli held on to the dogs and laughed, she picked me up-I outweighed her by ten pounds-and hoisted me, like a sack of grain, over the threshold.

BY THE END of that summer, Caroline and I had become accustomed to the new routes of our conjoined paths. The apartment was a couple of blocks from Fresh Pond, and carpenters and painters were working throughout the summer. Each day I would say to Clementine, "Would you like to go to Cambridge?" and she would bark in happy reply, more at my inflection than anything else. Then we would drive to the job site, talk to the guys working inside, and head over to the reservoir to meet Caroline and Lucille at the bottom of the hill. I usually had a collection of paint chips stuffed in my back pocket. Because Samoyeds are a mix of cream and off-white, we would line up the paint chips across Clementine's back for our consideration. I had taught her the command to be still, and so she would allow this folly, standing patiently while we envisioned her coat color as, say, a trim for the dining room. One evening a woman walked past us at the duck pond, where Caroline and I stood peering at eight shades of peach, and the woman raised an eyebrow and called out, "What are you of that summer, Caroline and I had become accustomed to the new routes of our conjoined paths. The apartment was a couple of blocks from Fresh Pond, and carpenters and painters were working throughout the summer. Each day I would say to Clementine, "Would you like to go to Cambridge?" and she would bark in happy reply, more at my inflection than anything else. Then we would drive to the job site, talk to the guys working inside, and head over to the reservoir to meet Caroline and Lucille at the bottom of the hill. I usually had a collection of paint chips stuffed in my back pocket. Because Samoyeds are a mix of cream and off-white, we would line up the paint chips across Clementine's back for our consideration. I had taught her the command to be still, and so she would allow this folly, standing patiently while we envisioned her coat color as, say, a trim for the dining room. One evening a woman walked past us at the duck pond, where Caroline and I stood peering at eight shades of peach, and the woman raised an eyebrow and called out, "What are you doing doing to that dog?" It was an easy summer, full of aimless walks and evening rows, and the unfolding clarity that I had taken a huge leap forward and was moving, heart and soul and cartons of books, to where I belonged. to that dog?" It was an easy summer, full of aimless walks and evening rows, and the unfolding clarity that I had taken a huge leap forward and was moving, heart and soul and cartons of books, to where I belonged.

THE MORNING OF September 11, I awoke to two voices simultaneously: the BBC announcer on the radio, reporting that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center, and my friend Pete on my answering machine, saying, "By now you probably know what's happened." The next ten minutes were the chaos of comprehension. With the TV and NPR in the background, I went online and saw that I had a three-word e-mail, still unknowing, from Caroline, sent a few minutes earlier: "did you row?" I shot one back: "New York towers. .h.i.t by terrorists go downstairs and turn on TV." Caroline's office was the third-floor attic of her house, and she was usually at her desk by eight-thirty or so, cloistered from the radio and phone. Within a few minutes we were on the phone together, watching the recurring horror on the TV screen, in the same limbo as everyone else. Because the planes had originated out of Logan Airport, in Boston, there was another layer of trepidation about the city itself; most of the-land-phone and cell lines were jammed for part of the morning. Caroline and I kept getting disconnected, and finally we made a backup plan in case the infrastructure failed. If things got worse-if something happened in Boston-we would both find a way to get to Fresh Pond, which was equidistant from each of our houses; we knew we could find each other there. September 11, I awoke to two voices simultaneously: the BBC announcer on the radio, reporting that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center, and my friend Pete on my answering machine, saying, "By now you probably know what's happened." The next ten minutes were the chaos of comprehension. With the TV and NPR in the background, I went online and saw that I had a three-word e-mail, still unknowing, from Caroline, sent a few minutes earlier: "did you row?" I shot one back: "New York towers. .h.i.t by terrorists go downstairs and turn on TV." Caroline's office was the third-floor attic of her house, and she was usually at her desk by eight-thirty or so, cloistered from the radio and phone. Within a few minutes we were on the phone together, watching the recurring horror on the TV screen, in the same limbo as everyone else. Because the planes had originated out of Logan Airport, in Boston, there was another layer of trepidation about the city itself; most of the-land-phone and cell lines were jammed for part of the morning. Caroline and I kept getting disconnected, and finally we made a backup plan in case the infrastructure failed. If things got worse-if something happened in Boston-we would both find a way to get to Fresh Pond, which was equidistant from each of our houses; we knew we could find each other there.

It was a nonsensical plan, like millions of others made that day. We laughed about it later-the cold, anguished laugh, like combat humor, that accompanied the next few days-and considered our own bad planning: Fresh Pond wasn't exactly a Red Cross evacuation center. But now the plan's absurdity is what touches me. We were acting out of instinct, like horses headed to the barn or birds being flushed out of a tree. We were simply aiming for shelter, for our own high ground.

I wound up going for a row late that day. I didn't know what else to do. The city by midafternoon was quieter than I hope it ever is again: no planes overhead, most foot and automobile traffic suspended. Already there was the dissonance that would unfold over the next few weeks: I saw a fool on the river who called out to me, "Beautiful day, isn't it?" The whole picture-perfect scene was like the opening pastoral shot in a horror movie, except that the horror had already happened. I kept thinking about the last scenes from On the Beach On the Beach, when the postnuclear blankness of an Australian beach is attended by the strains of "Waltzing Matilda." I was rowing under that now infamously blue sky, its emptiness chilling and inert, and I heard the eerie melancholy of "Waltzing Matilda" the entire way.

I MOVED INTO my house in early November, on Caroline's birthday. I sent her flowers that morning; she was taking care of Clementine while I watched movers run up and down the stairs. The New England fall, breathtaking and rueful under normal circ.u.mstances, had been eclipsed and upended by history's fallout. There was the suicide down the street, a woman whose fiance had been killed in the towers. The friend of a friend whose whereabouts had never been determined. Everyone had a dozen stories like these, all the concentric circles of calamity, sad details packed in between trauma and loss. In the first few days after the attack, responding to a city-wide plan, Caroline and I had stood on our porches one evening with candles held high, on the phone together; neither of us could see anyone else's glow, and this made us feel alternately weary and aghast at our futility. In the next several weeks we each stumbled into a version of survivor guilt, the flinch of awareness that could hit you in the midst of some mindless form of denial. Caroline would be playing computer solitaire and be overcome with sorrow or anxiety; I would be worrying over a renovation one minute and ready to fire all the painters the next, thinking I would send my leftover house budget to the New York firefighters fund. Everyone was getting a crash course in irony, the lesson that the grievous and the mundane exist in parallel spheres. One day I told her I felt ashamed for thinking about my house with the world in tatters, and she put her hand on my shoulder and gave a small shrug. "Paint chips ... Osama bin Laden," she said, using her hands to plot the entire range of human experience. "This is what life turns out to be." We were all living those days inside Auden's vision of Icarus. Even with a boy falling from the sky, the ships sailed calmly on. my house in early November, on Caroline's birthday. I sent her flowers that morning; she was taking care of Clementine while I watched movers run up and down the stairs. The New England fall, breathtaking and rueful under normal circ.u.mstances, had been eclipsed and upended by history's fallout. There was the suicide down the street, a woman whose fiance had been killed in the towers. The friend of a friend whose whereabouts had never been determined. Everyone had a dozen stories like these, all the concentric circles of calamity, sad details packed in between trauma and loss. In the first few days after the attack, responding to a city-wide plan, Caroline and I had stood on our porches one evening with candles held high, on the phone together; neither of us could see anyone else's glow, and this made us feel alternately weary and aghast at our futility. In the next several weeks we each stumbled into a version of survivor guilt, the flinch of awareness that could hit you in the midst of some mindless form of denial. Caroline would be playing computer solitaire and be overcome with sorrow or anxiety; I would be worrying over a renovation one minute and ready to fire all the painters the next, thinking I would send my leftover house budget to the New York firefighters fund. Everyone was getting a crash course in irony, the lesson that the grievous and the mundane exist in parallel spheres. One day I told her I felt ashamed for thinking about my house with the world in tatters, and she put her hand on my shoulder and gave a small shrug. "Paint chips ... Osama bin Laden," she said, using her hands to plot the entire range of human experience. "This is what life turns out to be." We were all living those days inside Auden's vision of Icarus. Even with a boy falling from the sky, the ships sailed calmly on.

IT'S TAKEN YEARS FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND THAT dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-time and s.p.a.ce and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection. dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-time and s.p.a.ce and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.I have several recurring dreams about Caroline. In one she is living calmly in the woods in a little house of blues and greens; in another, I am typing a letter to her, and the ink keeps disappearing on the page as I write. She is always dead or dying in these dreams, but they are not awful, or anguished-the reach between us always trumps the loss. And yet my one unbearable dream is the one in which she is sick and in treatment and I cannot find her. We have lost touch, or a phone has been disconnected, or my key breaks off in a locked door with her on the other side. There are many variations on this dream, the one from which I wake up clawing at s.p.a.ce, but the message is unchanged: Life, not death, has intervened."The holiness of the Heart's affections," Keats wrote, trusting in nothing but that and the imagination, and I think now that Caroline and I stilled something in each other, letting us go out and engage in the larger world. And as certain as I am about fact and memory and the influence of each upon the other, finding the threads of all these stories has sent me into an eerie, detached insistence that she not yet be gone. I have all the detritus of life and death that argues the contrary: the potato au gratin recipe in her small, careful handwriting that falls out of a cookbook; a first edition of J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip My Dog Tulip that she tracked down for me one Christmas. And a mysterious CD I found in her house after she was dead, ent.i.tled "Music for Caroline," its every song, from Norah Jones and Fiona Apple to Edith Piaf, a testament to the unknowable pa.s.sions we all carry within. that she tracked down for me one Christmas. And a mysterious CD I found in her house after she was dead, ent.i.tled "Music for Caroline," its every song, from Norah Jones and Fiona Apple to Edith Piaf, a testament to the unknowable pa.s.sions we all carry within.Once she referred to the core ambiguities of life as "the dark side of joy," and here, these days, has been the reverse: a happy limbo in which I have brought her along on the journey. The writer's self-imposed fugue state. She has been thoroughly alive in the meadows and woods with the dogs, through each rowing lesson and argument and carefree phone call. Her death these days is somewhere down the hall, behind a closed but unlocked door. But for now she is river-tan and laughing, and pretty soon the phone will ring and one of us will say What are you doing? What are you doing? and it will all begin again. and it will all begin again.

9.

CAROLINE STARTED COUGHING IN THE WINTER. A dry cough, not yet worrisome, what seemed like a gravelly smoker's accompaniment to her singular voice. She was run down from finishing a book; she could have stood to gain ten pounds. For Christmas she gave me a mezuzah to hang near my entry door for blessings on the new house. We went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday on a frigid night in January, and she seemed subdued, but we both attributed this to work and emotional fatigue. If she was worried about her health-and she was, as it turned out-she told no one but her sister, Becca. dry cough, not yet worrisome, what seemed like a gravelly smoker's accompaniment to her singular voice. She was run down from finishing a book; she could have stood to gain ten pounds. For Christmas she gave me a mezuzah to hang near my entry door for blessings on the new house. We went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday on a frigid night in January, and she seemed subdued, but we both attributed this to work and emotional fatigue. If she was worried about her health-and she was, as it turned out-she told no one but her sister, Becca.

Two seemingly disparate incidents would later rea.s.sert themselves. Caroline tried to swim her usual forty or fifty lengths in the pool and finished only seven before she could go no farther. And then one cold, sunny afternoon in early March, her legs went out from under her at Fresh Pond with no warning. She recovered almost immediately, and sat down on a park bench to call me, minimizing the event even as she described it. For reasons I can only guess at, I absorbed this information with an urgency and dread that were disproportionate to the thing itself. I grabbed my car keys and flew out of the house, driving the few blocks to the pond to save time. When I saw her on the rise above the parking lot, I went running; by the time I reached her, she was shaking her head that it had been nothing-a momentary collapse, low blood sugar, something transient and benign.

Much of my alarm that day came from the fact that Caroline was one of the most stoic people I had ever known. She rarely got sick; when she did, she barely complained. But the coughing, hollow and persistent, didn't get better. She cut her smoking by half, then half again. Oddly, I was worried about my own health at the time. Felled by a couple of common winter bugs, I had responded, uncharacteristically, with a dark unease I couldn't shake.

Caroline had a chest X-ray and was treated for pneumonia, and the antibiotics bought her a few weeks of ease. At the end of March, on an unseasonably warm day when the river was still, we both took the boats out for the first time since the fall. She rowed her standard five miles. She would be in the hospital not long thereafter, but then, on that day, there was no wind and the water was gla.s.s. When we walked together at the end of the afternoon, she said it was the only time in fifteen years that the first row of the season had felt effortless.

That word kept coming back to me in the brutal revisionism of the days that followed. Two weeks after that perfect row, Morelli took Caroline to the emergency room late one Sunday night; she was burning up with fever and had pneumonia again. For a couple of days the doctors thought she might have tuberculosis, and we all had to wear masks in the hospital room. Those masks: She told me that she knew the news was bad when the nurses stopped wearing them, and began treating her with excruciating kindness.

I was there by chance when the doctor finished the bronchoscopy, a procedure that revealed an inoperable tumor on the lung, cla.s.sified as stage-four non-small-cell adenocarcinoma. I had been absurdly positive in the two days before the procedure, consoling Caroline that she was too young to have cancer, that the mysterious spots on her liver they had detected would turn out to be nothing. Becca, who shared Caroline's poise and stillness under pressure, told me as we waited in the surgical recovery room that we should prepare for the worst, and I was stunned: She was a physician, and I trusted her far more than I did my own desperate optimism. Then the pulmonary specialist walked through the doors, threw his lanky body in a nearby chair, shrugged with a shred of kindness, and said those words that made the surrounding comments disappear: "inoperable," "necrotic," "palliative." And the obscene euphemism that telegraphs the end: "We can make her more comfortable."

I remember two things from the rest of that day with glaring clarity. One was Caroline crying as I wrapped my arms around her, after they had brought her back up to her room, when the first thing she said to me was "Are you mad at me?" It was the voice of early terror, a primal response to bad news, and to this day I don't know whether she meant because we had fought about the smoking or because she knew she was going to leave.

The other picture is from late that afternoon, after I had left the hospital long enough to walk Clementine and get some things Caroline needed. I was walking down my street toward the neighborhood park, and I saw a friend and her seven-year-old daughter up ahead on the basketball court. I looked their way just as Sophie aimed the ball and made the shot. "Mom!" she cried out. "Did you see?" see?" It was her first triumph on the court, and I had been her serendipitous witness, and the force of that simple reach toward joy took my breath away. The afternoon was flush with light, and Caroline was dying, and Sophie had scored. It was her first triumph on the court, and I had been her serendipitous witness, and the force of that simple reach toward joy took my breath away. The afternoon was flush with light, and Caroline was dying, and Sophie had scored. Mom! Mom! There she was, the life everlasting, shooting hoops. There she was, the life everlasting, shooting hoops.

THE NEXT FEW DAYS were a blur of bad dispatches. More tests revealed that the cancer had metastasized to Caroline's liver and brain; by the weekend, an oncologist had joined the team, and they had started emergency radiation to the brain and a five-hour initial (and desperate) round of chemotherapy. The antibiotics had cleared up the secondary pneumonia, and there was a small window between the diagnosis and the debilitating effects of the treatment when Caroline didn't feel sick. We were all in shock, consumed with the errands of crisis, making lists of people to call and objects to procure that seemed essential: a favorite T-shirt, a tortoisesh.e.l.l comb. Morelli had figured out a way to smuggle Lucille into the hospital after the evening shift had begun, and we would climb on the bed with the dog and pa.s.s around Italian takeout. Caroline started telling dumb jokes one night, with me and Morelli laughing, and then she stopped midsentence and we all stared at one another, the scene out of some weeper made-for-TV movie. Everything about it felt absurd and precious, filtered through that brief brightness that appears when death is in the room. The first night of the diagnosis, Caroline had told me that she had asked Morelli to marry her, and that we had a wedding to plan, and there was a piercing tenderness to those initial days that helped to contain the next several weeks. were a blur of bad dispatches. More tests revealed that the cancer had metastasized to Caroline's liver and brain; by the weekend, an oncologist had joined the team, and they had started emergency radiation to the brain and a five-hour initial (and desperate) round of chemotherapy. The antibiotics had cleared up the secondary pneumonia, and there was a small window between the diagnosis and the debilitating effects of the treatment when Caroline didn't feel sick. We were all in shock, consumed with the errands of crisis, making lists of people to call and objects to procure that seemed essential: a favorite T-shirt, a tortoisesh.e.l.l comb. Morelli had figured out a way to smuggle Lucille into the hospital after the evening shift had begun, and we would climb on the bed with the dog and pa.s.s around Italian takeout. Caroline started telling dumb jokes one night, with me and Morelli laughing, and then she stopped midsentence and we all stared at one another, the scene out of some weeper made-for-TV movie. Everything about it felt absurd and precious, filtered through that brief brightness that appears when death is in the room. The first night of the diagnosis, Caroline had told me that she had asked Morelli to marry her, and that we had a wedding to plan, and there was a piercing tenderness to those initial days that helped to contain the next several weeks.

She called me early one morning and I grabbed the phone and said, "Are you all right?" and she said, "Yes, I've run away-I'm thinking of going for a row." The hospital was by the river, and her upstairs room overlooked the bend of the Charles where rowers pa.s.sed each morning, and she could see them at first light from her bed. Within a few days she had asked the nurses to keep the curtains closed. But on that morning she was still kidding around, still able to pretend that she would be back out there soon enough. "I miss us," us," she told me on the phone that morning. "I miss our lives together." she told me on the phone that morning. "I miss our lives together."

Because we knew everything had changed, the ways in which we communicated this to each other were as careful as they were certain. We talked about the will she was having drawn up; she told Morelli and me one night that we had to promise to walk the dogs together once a week forever. "My boat and my linen," she said, about her bequest to me; earlier that month, I had borrowed half the jackets in her closet for a trip I had to take to Austin in a few weeks. Her wryness prevailed above all else. "Oh G.o.d," she said to me the second night after the diagnosis, when we were making lists of people to call. "Now I'm going to have to listen to people's remission stories."

But at night, when I had left the hospital, I would come home and stand in the dark in the backyard, where the viburnum was in bloom, and bury my face in its fragrance and weep. After I had walked Clementine, I would go online and read about non-small-cell adenocarcinoma in the medical journals. The word "prognosis" had not yet entered our conversation, but I knew. I had called two friends who were physicians, and both had been kind enough to give me their unadorned opinion. Neither believed she had more than a few months.

I took lots of notes during these phone conversations-scrawled, elaborate notes, quotes from the doctor friends, my way of organizing the unfathomable. "Worst, most advanced," I wrote, underneath "stage four-non-small-cell adenocarcinoma." "Tumors in liver ... Radiation will help with pain and with swelling of brain." And then, in smaller script at the end of the page: "No help at all in prolonging life."

Caroline's doctors disagreed as to the cause and origin of the tumor on the lung: A pulmonary specialist was certain it was smoking-related; an oncologist was equally sure it was not. This mattered greatly to Caroline and not at all to me, though I tried to shield her from the verdict of the lung specialist, whose work in the trenches may have steeled him from the wreckage he had to see each day. Caroline had stopped smoking in the week before the diagnosis, and she clung to this: Her recoveries from anorexia and alcoholism had been long battles against self-destruction, and she needed to know she had made one huge effort to save herself here. The reason I cared less about the tumor's origin was pragmatic: As much as I had worried about Caroline's smoking, its causative agency had not a shred of effect on the diagnosis, any more than being pushed off a building protects you from falling off it.

On Friday, the night they started the chemo, Caroline was in bed wearing the T-shirt I had brought her, an IV in her arm, when I came in. She asked if she could keep the shirt; of course, I said. She asked me to set and program her new underwater sports watch, so she could time her laps in the pool when she got out of the hospital. She had always paced her steps to mine and now I was doing the same, dipping when she led. "If you had told me before all this," she said that night, "about somebody with lung cancer and metastases in four places, I'd have said, 'Oh my G.o.d, he only has six months.'" Then she held out the slender, muscled arm with the IV and shook her head and smiled. "But these doctors don't know how strong I am."

All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that creva.s.se between s.p.a.ce and time that stays fixed in the imagination. I remember it all because I remember it all. In crisis with someone you love, the dialogue is as burnished as a scar on a tree. It shocks me now what I remember, though I suppose it shouldn't, because I have Caroline's voice fixed in my heart. That voice: the inflection, the range, the perfectly timed humor. This I would not lose.

By Monday, the effects of the chemotherapy had taken hold. Caroline had called her therapist-a man she had known and loved for two decades-in the first days of the diagnosis, but he had not yet been to the hospital; each of them may have been trying to postpone the grimness of the situation. That day she had lost whatever physical and psychological composure she possessed. She was violently ill, and weak, and I spent most of the afternoon sitting next to her while she slept. Four or five hours pa.s.sed, during which Caroline would wake and start and then drift off again. I would exchange one cold rag for another and rea.s.sume my post. It was an odd and effortless station in which both time and thought disappeared. Later, Caroline told me she had dreamed all afternoon of me and her brother, who was in and out of the room as well.

When the phone rang I grabbed it to keep from waking her. "Caroline?" said a man's voice. "No," I said, "this is Gail." "Oh, Gail," her therapist said, recognizing my name and knowing his would be familiar to me. "This is David Herzog." I cupped my hand around the mouthpiece. "I was going to call you," I said. "You need to get up here. Now."

He was there that evening, and Caroline and I laughed later at my no-nonsense imperative-at my ability to do what she could not, which was to reach for him across the divide of fear. He was a bear of a man, and I became fiercely fond of him in the next few weeks, relying on his strength and straightforward kindness when the rest of the world seemed respondent to some deranged gyroscope. It was Herzog I spoke with when medical and emotional realities collided; he who called every day or two to see how I was holding up. I could talk openly with him about what Caroline was enduring and what time she had left. We a.s.sumed a ready-made mantle of intimacy that could not fail us: Ours was a wind tunnel attachment. We knew we were both central to Caroline's life, and we knew what we each stood to lose.

Here was another meadow of familiarity that Caroline and I had shared over the years. Herzog, as she called him, had been a pillar in the life she had rebuilt on the other side of anorexia. With our strong attachments to powerful fathers, we had each found sanctuary with male psychiatrists. More central was a mutual belief in psychodynamic therapy: the long, mountainous (often monotonous) version, in which you stayed in the room with your fears and history along with a witness who could bear the depths of your story. We lived in a cultural milieu-East Coast, post-1960s-in which therapy was taken for granted, and we each considered the work we'd done there crucial to who we were and to all ground gained. Caroline and I believed in the transformative power of therapy as surely as we did in AA or facing the truth or the loyalty of dogs.

Caroline stayed in the hospital for the rest of the week, until she was strong enough to go home; Morelli moved into her house to take care of her. The doctors wanted to get her stable with meds and radiation so that she might endure the next several weeks of chemotherapy. Her tribe of friends and extended family had taken on every detail of incapacitating illness; there were dog walkers and cooks and drivers at every changing of the guard. She had entered that zone of infirmity difficult for the worried well to appreciate: We were all circling her like heartbroken hens, while Caroline was simply trying to swallow a bagel or get through a phone call. At her insistence, she and I tried taking a short walk at Fresh Pond with the dogs, maybe a hundred yards or so around the upper leg of the peninsula-a five-minute loop under normal circ.u.mstances that now took three times as long. We stopped on a bench to rest, gave the dogs a biscuit, started again. When she faltered, I put my arm out to steady her, a reversal of roles as wrenching as it was automatic.

She had started to exhibit small neurological symptoms, which I believe above all enraged her-she dropped a towel twice in front of me and refused to let me pick it up. We maintained a dialogue during these days that was partly code, but still as surefooted as Caroline used to be when crossing a stream. "You're just trying to get out of making me soup," I would say, referring to the old promise she'd made to cook for me when I got old. She called one night after she'd met with her oncologist for the first time outside the hospital, and started quoting the statistics on prognosis that were an optimistic version of what I'd read: the clinical trials under way, the new research studies at Ma.s.s General, the outside odds of two to five years to live. Her voice was soft and bright during this recitation, and I listened without saying anything, conscious of how harsh the light was in the living room.

"The point is to buy time," she said, and we were both dr